Recent concerns about the Nipah virus are a timely reminder that another pandemic is inevitable. There’s been five pandemics over the last 60 years– an average of one every 12 years – and this year it’s seven years since COVID locked down the world.
So, are we better prepared?
The Australian Centre for Disease Control (CDC) formally commenced operation in 2026, to bring together experts, data and evidence to give independent public health advice to government. This centralised response should alleviate all the angst created by different public health advice and management across the States.
However, the data the CDC relies upon remains disjointed and inconsistent. There are dozens of Laboratory Information Systems and instances used by public and private laboratories across Australia; different brands, with different configurations, data formats and codes for tests and results; making consolidation a complex and time-consuming process that takes days.
We can’t manage a pandemic if we can’t track it in real time.
The Australian Digital Health Agency tackles this issue in the National Healthcare Interoperability Plan which focuses on healthcare organisations achieving data sharing interoperability through the development and adoption of standards and specifications including Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR).
The Australian Government committed $9.3 million in 2023/24 and an additional $1.8 million in 2024/25 for CSIRO to accelerate the development and adoption of national FHIR standards for healthcare data exchange. An independent report by Voronoi in 2025 noted the standards developed to date are “fit-for-purpose” but adoption is slow due to the lack of incentives for change.
A CSIRO report titled Strengthening Australia’s Pandemic Preparedness, states:
“While the (National Healthcare Interoperability) Plan sets the direction for a nationally coordinated future state for the entire health system, there are opportunities for technology-enabled interventions that can be implemented in parallel with the Plan to satisfy data sharing needs for pandemic preparedness.”
One such technology intervention that should be considered is a system the UK use called Labgnostic (aka the National Pathology Exchange or NPEx) by X-Lab Systems.
Labgnostic is a highly secure, system agnostic data translation service that takes data from individual LISs and transforms it into the formats required by other LISs, government agencies and data repositories. It doesn’t matter that the data comes from different IT systems, in different formats, using different communication protocols – Labgnostic manages this complexity, enabling healthcare organisations to share data instantly.
Labgnostic also streamlines connectivity and maintenance. Instead of a complex web of point-to point interfaces, each lab connects once to the Labgnostic network, which allows it to exchange data with all other labs and government agencies.
During the pandemic, the NHS mandated the use of Labgnostic for all labs doing COVID19 testing so they could achieve immediate interoperability. X-Lab onboarded 41 labs in just six weeks, scaling Labgnostic from doing an average of 1,000 tests a day to a peak of 11 million a week, with capacity to do even more.
Labgnostic was the work engine that collected results from all 180 LIS instances and delivered results to labs and a range of government agencies, in their preferred format, in real time. It was this infrastructure that enabled the NHS to track the spread and intensity of the virus, so they could make informed and timely pandemic management decisions.
In the meantime, there’s a lot of operational benefits that could be realised now – reductions in paper, manual data entry, duplication, transcription errors and patient risk, all of which lead to better resource utilisation, increased throughput, faster turnaround times and improved patient outcomes.
The economic benefits of health information exchange interoperability for Australia were modelled in 2007 with Level 4 interoperability benefits estimated at $2,990 million – of which laboratory benefits account for 39%, or $1,180 million, each and every year post implementation.
If a new pandemic hit tomorrow, we could have a national pathology exchange operational in weeks but wouldn’t it be better to do this now so we are ready and our society can reap the benefits in the meantime?
Maybe. The MHR work to transition away from a document format model to FHIR, the interoperability agenda and structured pathology data are all attributes to improve capability. Furthermore, the Centre for Disease Control also has a project planned that intend to leverage these initiatives. Most laboratories would still have in place those systems that were developed and used during COVID. Whilst the article indicates on average every twelve years (one could happen tomorrow) we will be better prepared regardless than the last time and in the next five years, I would expect Pathology to be in better shape than it is today, knowing some of the work that is happening, including wider adoption of SPIA and some of the proposed national legislative changes.